Systems employing numerous devices often require or otherwise benefit from the ability for these devices to communicate with one another. While each device may have its own purpose and responsibilities, they may need to transmit information to, and/or receive information from, other devices of the system. Device-to-device communication may be accomplished by wiring the devices together, and communicating via the wires. Systems today are continually moving towards wireless communication, which generally makes installation more convenient, and among other things provides greater flexibility and scalability.
A drawback to wireless communication is that information transfer is not confined to a wire, as in a direct wired system. Rather, the information is transmitted over the air, and transmissions from neighboring systems can interfere with system communications. To address this issue, wireless network systems have employed various methods of transmitting radio signals, such as frequency hopping. Frequency hopping generally refers to a modulation technique where the signal carrier is rapidly switched among many frequency channels. Each party to the communication must know the frequency hopping sequence in order to know when it is to transmit at a certain frequency in the sequence. Using the frequency hopping sequence, transmitting devices can properly address targeted devices, and receiving devices can reject information from neighboring devices that are not within their system but within their reception range.
The selection of the ordered list of hopping frequencies in a frequency hopping sequence should be selected to minimize interference to and from neighboring systems sharing the same frequency space. However, because a device may be deployed anywhere, it is advantageous to determine the frequency hopping sequence during the installation of the devices of the system. When a frequency hopping sequence is determined during installation of a device, the complete sequence (or sequences) is typically stored in local memory of each device. This consumes valuable memory space and can increase cost, especially where the sequences are relatively long. Where sequences are shared among multiple devices, the entire hopping sequence must be transmitted to each device. This further requires potentially long message transfers of the hopping sequence, and can introduce security concerns particularly when transmitting the sequence over the air. Storing the sequence itself necessarily means that the sequence is available in the memory of each communication device, which can make the sequence further susceptible to security problems.
Accordingly, there is a need in the communications industry for systems, methods and apparatuses for utilizing frequency hopping sequences without experiencing the aforementioned and other problems associated with the prior art. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and offers other advantages over the prior art.